You have to be very deeply into Democratic Party politics to write a blank-days-that-shook-the-blank headline about this.

"10 Days That Shook the House Map and Democratic Confidence."

That's the top headline at the NYT this morning. 

You know the story: "Just two weeks ago, Democrats felt increasingly emboldened about taking control of the House in November after seeming to fight the redistricting wars to a draw. But two court rulings — one by the Supreme Court and another by Virginia’s top court — and an aggressive new push by red states to carve up congressional maps have delivered the Republican Party its biggest burst of momentum in many months. Put bluntly, Republicans have roughly 10 more House seats that favor them than they did just 10 days ago, and Democrats are suddenly grappling with a new landscape."

This feels like one of those NYT articles that's mainly performing the service of tending to the readers' emotions. Let's all do panic together this morning. When I encounter that sort of thing, my natural instinct is to go somewhere else. If we're doing group emotion, I'm looking for the door.

So: I'm interested in the history of titles in the blank-days-that-shook-the-blank form. The original is "10 Days That Shook the World," the 1919 first-hand account of the Russian Revolution by John Reed. His editor described Reed's frenzy:

"If I became a writer and artist of children’s books... it was not because I had in mind to create children’s books."

"I wanted Babar to live on (or, as some will say, my father to live on). I wanted to stay in his country, the elephant world which is both a utopia and a gentle satire on the society of men.... Babar and I both... take the same care to avoid over-dramatization of the events or situations that do arise. If we take the correct, efficient steps, we both believe that a happy end will come.... [T]here is a message in the Babar books, a message of nonviolence."

Wrote Laurent de Brunhoff, quoted in "Laurent de Brunhoff, Artist Who Made Babar Famous, Dies at 98/After his father, who created the character, died, he continued the series of books about a modest elephant and his escapades in Paris for seven decades" (NYT).

Babar was invented by Laurent de Brunhoff's mother, Cécile de Brunhoff. It was a bedtime story, told to Laurent when he was 5, and retold to his father, Jean de Brunhoff, who took the story further in words and drawings. Jean created the first 7 books, then died of tuberculosis at age 37. Laurent continued his father's world — the elephant world, where he wanted to stay.

The obituary links to a NYT book review from 40 years ago. The book is "What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds," which explains how "Babar's story is a lesson in colonialism with racist overtones." We're told: "[The author, Ariel] Dorfman explicates these episodes and stories at academic length. He even deciphers the racial and sexual symbolism of Zephyr the monkey and Silver the stallion. For authority, he cites such authors as Gyorgy Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon, blending in the psychoanalytic leaven found in much Marxist writing."

Babar racist? It's an easy shot. The elephant is a big target.

Now, I don't even feel like making a new post for every new indictment.

 I'm like... what else is new?

"The social media network known as Mastodon is sort of an anti-Twitter: quiet, calm, and refreshingly free of Nazis."

"People have been flocking to it lately, only to get confused by the way it’s set up—which is a shame, because it’s not that hard to get started. Here’s how."

I'm reading "How to Move From Twitter to Mastodon/There are many similarities between the two—except that Mastodon feels like a nice place to be" (lifehacker). 

I'm reading that because I wanted to take a look at something I've heard about a lot lately, but — as it says above — I got confused. I had to find an article explaining it.

I'm confused by this article too. How can a speech forum have a mood as specific as quiet and calm? And what kind of dolt feels "refreshed" by a feeling that a place is "free of Nazis"? I would expect Nazis — especially dangerous Nazis — to lull people into "not see"ing them (until it's too late). You know those old movies where somebody would say "It's quiet. Too quiet." It's like that, I would think. If you're saying "It's refreshingly free of Nazis," you ought to go on to say "Too refreshingly free of Nazis." 

And what's this "Mastodon feels like a nice place to be"? Yeah, feels like.

Lifehacker proceeds to help us with our confusion by trying — trying — to talk to us as though we are easily triggered by anything that sounds disconnected from a simple, off-screen life:

"If factory made baby formula is in short supply, health authorities need to do better than telling parents not to DIY."

"This is just another 'abstinence only' model that won't work. If babies are hungry, parents are going to feed them, guidelines be damned. The appropriate response then is for pediatric nutrition experts to publish safe recipes for emergency nutrition supplementation with explicit warnings to not deviate from the recipe with clear descriptions of the consequences that can result from doing so. If this is an emergency, treat it like one, with emergency stop-gap measures." 

That's one of many comments making the same point — the point I made 2 days ago — at the NYT article "Why Doctors Don’t Recommend Homemade Baby Formula/Amid a nationwide formula shortage, some parents are D.I.Y.-ing recipes. But pediatricians strongly advise against it."

The most absurd thing in the article is an anecdote about a baby that had a heart attack after consuming only formula made from coconut water, sea moss, and chia seeds! Just tell people the best mixture that's based on canned unsweetened evaporated milk. That's what the Baby Boomers were fed, and nothing went haywire.

They're afraid people will do it wrong, but they're withholding advice on what would be best! They don't want responsibility, but that's just forcing people to use their own judgment about the best recipe. It’s not that hard. It's not mastering the art of French cooking.

"CUNY law school dean cancels herself after ‘slaveholder’ comment."

 The NY Post reports. 

In an email sent Saturday to the college community, [Mary Lu] Bilek said her retirement stemmed from a cringe-worthy remark she made at a personnel committee meeting in November. The group was discussing an open position for associate dean at the time. Bilek said that when she dropped the “slaveholder” reference, she was taking the blame for a hiring proposal some colleagues thought would have a “disparate racial impact.”

“In a misguided effort to draw an analogy to a model of reparations in order to place blame on myself, as Dean, for racial inequities at our school, I thoughtlessly referred to myself as the ‘slaveholder’ who should be held responsible,” Bilek wrote. “I realized it was wrong the minute I heard myself say it and couldn’t believe the word had come out of my mouth.”

Bilek went on to write that she apologized immediately at the meeting “and have since apologized without reservation to the faculty.”

“I am still shocked at what I said and have begun education and counseling to uncover and overcome my biases and further understand the history and consequences of systemic and institutional racism,” she wrote....

She was trying to take blame, but she's not as blameworthy as a slaveholder, so the analogy to a slaveholder taking blame, was... was what? She was taking blame for something racial — disparate racial impact — but disparate racial impact is much less bad than slavery, so in making the analogy, she was exaggerating her own blame. Then, she got blamed for that exaggeration, and she reacted by canceling herself — firing herself into retirement — which is another dramatic exaggeration. The original offense was to exaggerate, the exaggeration was then exaggerated, and in response to the exaggeration, she performed an additional exaggeration.

It's a perfect storm of self-dramatization. But I don't have the inside view, only Bilek's reaction. I can only attempt to imagine how the other people at CUNY School of Law behave.

"She told us he would never be able to get a job, and that teachers wouldn’t want to teach him. 'I tried to explain that we are not religious people, and Lucifer in Greek means "light-bringer" and "morning" but she wouldn’t listen.'"

Says a father quoted in "HELLUVA NAME/Couple win battle to name son Lucifer after registrar tried to bar them because it is another name for the devil" (The Sun).

[Dan Sheldon] 37, a plant hire company boss, lodged an official complaint over how he and Mandy, 32, were treated at their local office in Chesterfield, Derbys. He said: “We were really excited to go and get him registered but the woman looked at us in utter disgust.... She even told us that it was illegal to name a child that in New Zealand and that maybe we could name him something else but refer to him as Lucifer at home....”

Chesterfield is in England.

“We were gobsmacked with her behaviour. Eventually she did it, but it was through gritted teeth. Honestly, we just thought it was a nice name . . . a unique one. We didn’t expect to get so much grief about it.”

Derbyshire County Council said: “We apologise if they were offended but it is the job of our registrars to advise in these matters as sometimes people are not aware of certain meanings or associations around certain names.”

So the problem here is not that the parents wanted to name their child Lucifer, but that the government official gave them any friction at all. The name was registered, the parents made an official complaint against the government worker, and the county council apologized.

From the Wikipedia article, "Lucifer":

The motif of a heavenly being striving for the highest seat of heaven only to be cast down to the underworld has its origins in the motions of the planet Venus, known as the morning star. The Sumerian goddess Inanna (Babylonian Ishtar) is associated with the planet Venus.... A similar theme is present in the Babylonian myth of Etana...

"Republicans were once despised because they were anti-intellectuals and hopeless neurotics."

"Trained to disbelieve in peaceful coexistence with the liberal enemy, the average Rush Limbaugh fan couldn’t make it through a dinner without interrogating you about your political inclinations. If you tried to laugh it off, that didn’t work; if you tried to engage, what came back was a list of talking points. When all else failed and you offered what you thought would be an olive branch of blunt truth, i.e. 'Honestly, I just don’t give that much of a shit,' that was the worst insult of all, because they thought you were being condescending. (You were, but that’s beside the point). The defining quality of this personality was the inability to let things go. Families broke apart over these situations. It was a serious and tragic thing. Now that same inconsolable paranoiac comes at you with left politics, and isn’t content with ruining the odd holiday dinner, blind date, or shared cab. He or she does this infuriating interrogating at the office, in school, and in government agencies, in places where you can’t fake a headache and quietly leave the table."

From "The Left is Now the Right/We laughed at the Republican busybody who couldn't joke, declared war on dirty paintings, and peered through your bedroom window. Now that person has switched sides, and nobody's laughing" by Matt Taibbi (substack).

Why "shirtless" was trending on Twitter.

This. Is. BANANAS!! 🤣🤣🤣 Too bad it's not ACTUALLY Jeff Goldblum. That would be even greater.

(For the record, OP confirmed shirtless dude both started it AND deserved the ass-whooping for yelling rapey shit at women on the street) https://t.co/hidSf8nK5y

— Dorian Connelley (@dorianconnelley) May 12, 2020

"There’s a theory of risk stratification... Isolate people but really isolate the vulnerable people. Don’t isolate everyone because some people, most people, are not vulnerable to it."

"And if you isolate all people, you may be actually exposing the more vulnerable people by bringing in a person who is healthier and stronger and who may have been exposed to the virus, right.... Younger people can go back to work. People who have resolved can go back to work... People who — once we get this antibody test — show that they had the virus and they resolved can go back to work. That’s how I think you do it. … It’s not [that] we’re going to either do public health or we’re going to do economic development and restarting. We have to do both."

Said Governor Cuomo yesterday (quoted at the New York Post).

"We closed everything down. That was our public health strategy... If you re-thought that or had time to analyze that public health strategy, I don’t know that you would say ‘Quarantine everyone.'... I don’t even know that that was the best public health policy. Young people then quarantined with older people, [it] was probably not the best public health strategy...."

Cuomo, like Trump, seems to be spending a lot of time on camera and thinking aloud. The 2 men are saying a lot of the same things, struggling with incomplete and conflicting ideas. Naturally, Trump gets more criticism, as there are those in the press who look for the worst sentence in his hours of talking and make a headline out of it. But to my ear, the 2 men are far more alike than different.

ADDED: Old men going on camera and rambling. There's a sort of Theater of Transparency. I get that, but I'm thinking it's overdone, and something shorter and stronger would be more helpful. At some point, I really empathize with these old guys showing us their struggle with an unmanageable force of nature. But then I begin to think it's crazy, their lingering before the camera, going on and on as if to make the argument, I am trying hard but it's so hellishly difficult, and I think, no, it's not your personal struggle. It's not about our feeling for you as you're stuck doing something that can't be done right. Give a clear, factual report, combine realism and optimism in the way that will be most helpful to those of us who are trying to do our part and keep going, and then get off the stage.

"Trump impeachment drive has similarities to Wisconsin recall."

ABC News is just noticing.

I don't need a refresher on the Wisconsin uprising against Scott Walker, but the key similarities lie in the future. After Walker-haters stormed their way to a recall election, they not only lost the recall, they lost the next regular election.

The ABC article tells us:

Walker ultimately won the recall election in June 2012, becoming a conservative hero on his way to a short-lived run for president in 2015. In a testament to Wisconsin’s political division, just five months after Walker won the recall vote, Obama cruised to victory in Wisconsin on his way to reelection....

Yeah, but Walker won his next election. That fact is tucked away in the article, here:

"The reality is that Barr is... marketing apocalyptic hogwash because, for his boss to get re-elected, Trump’s supporters must continue to believe..."

"... that liberals and the Democratic Party are the embodiment of evil, determined to destroy the American way of life. Relentless pressure to maintain the urgency of that threat is crucial to Trump’s political survival. It is embedded in the president’s rhetoric, core to his manic ambition and essential to his re-election strategy. The unanswered question is whether it is necessary not only to bolster Trump’s at once inflated and fragile ego, but also for the continued competitive strength of the Republican Party. Based on the evidence before us now, it certainly seems that it is."

Those are the last few lines of "Liberals Do Not Want to Destroy the Family/Or society, for that matter. How did this preposterous idea leap to the forefront of conservative thinking?" by Thomas Edsall (NYT). He's reacting to the recent speech in which Barr railed against "licentiousness — the unbridled pursuit of personal appetites at the expense of the common good."

I'm too jaded to take any of that seriously. Don't liberals also rail against "the unbridled pursuit of personal appetites at the expense of the common good"? And don't Democrats, to get elected, seem to think people must believe that the GOP is the embodiment of evil, determined to destroy the American way of life?

It's another impeachment hearing day?! The Democrats are smothering their own debate from both sides.

Last night's debate happened after a long grueling day of impeachment hearings. It ended late, many of us couldn't take the huge crowd and the wild yelling, but as we look at the news this morning, we see the set up for today's impeachment hearings. The debate never gets a chance to mean anything. It's forgotten like last night's bad dream... the one about being chased through Atlanta by Amy Klobuchar's vibrating hair helmet.

"But just when information is needed most, to many Americans it feels most elusive."

"The rise of social media; the proliferation of information online, including news designed to deceive; and a flood of partisan news are leading to a general exhaustion with news itself.... [People are] tuning out. Mr. Trudell, a registered independent, stopped paying attention to national news about a year ago. He found it toxic and mentally taxing, and it started arguments that had no end.... The degree of alienation is new. In the late 1970s, nearly three quarters of Americans trusted newspapers, radio and television. Walter Cronkite read the news every night, and most Americans went to bed with the same set of facts, even if they had different political views.... New academic work is emerging that supports the view that news avoidance is not about left or right. Benjamin J. Toff, an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Minnesota, conducted in-depth interviews in Iowa this summer and found that those who say they avoid the news tended to be younger, female and poorer — people already stretched between jobs and home, making hours of evaluating news sources 'the last thing they wanted to do with their time,' Professor Toff said. 'They had this sense that they had to be skeptical of everything out there but they didn’t have the time to spend hours to make sense of it,' he said."

From "‘No One Believes Anything’: Voters Worn Out by a Fog of Political News/Paying attention to the impeachment inquiry and other developments means having to figure out what is true, false or spin. Many Americans are throwing up their hands and tuning it all out" (NYT).

This made me think of that NYT article from March 2018, "The Man Who Knew Too Little/The most ignorant man in America knows that Donald Trump is president — but that’s about it. Living a liberal fantasy is complicated." A guy named Erik Hagerman was disturbed by what happened on election day, 2016, so he "developed his own eccentric experiment, one that was part silent protest, part coping mechanism, part extreme self-care plan.... 'It was draconian and complete... It’s not like I wanted to just steer away from Trump or shift the conversation. It was like I was a vampire and any photon of Trump would turn me to dust.'"

Silent protest... coping... extreme self-care plan.... Yeah, lots of us are coming around to that.

"I missed Buttigieg's closing statement because the dumb NBC News Roku channel interrupted to ask if I'm still watching."

Writes my son John at the end of his live blogging of last night's debate — when he was writing something for each of the closing statements:

10:53 — Swalwell: "I'm a father of a 2-year-old and an infant. When I'm not changing diapers, I'm changing Washington. Most of the time, the diapers smell better."

10:54 — Williamson: "Donald Trump is not going to be beaten just by insider politics talk.… He's reached into the psyche of the American people, and he's harnessed fear for political purposes.… I'm going to harness love for political purposes … and love will win."

10:55 — Hickenlooper seems to have saved up his whole pitch till the end: "We expanded reproductive health to reduce teenage abortion.… We were the first state [Colorado] to legalize marijuana.… We got to near universal health care coverage."

10:56 — Gillibrand: "Women are on fire!"

10:57 — Yang says he'll build "a broad coalition" including "libertarians" — the only time they're mentioned by any of the Democratic candidates.

10:58 — Harris tries to convince us that she should be the nominee based on her prosecutorial background, saying she'll "prosecute the case against 4 more years of Donald Trump."

10:59 — I missed Buttigieg's closing statement because the dumb NBC News Roku channel interrupted to ask if I'm still watching.

11:00 — Sanders, seeming to draw inspiration from President Eisenhower, says he'll fight "the military-industrial complex."

11:01 — Biden promises to "restore the soul of this country — the president has ripped it out." "This is the United States of America! We can do anything if we're together — together."

By then, I'd closed down my computer. It wasn't that I'd got sleepy. I was tired of the rancor. I'm up again this morning at 4 a.m., looking back and assessing what happened to me. I had distanced myself from these people as I was watching, but now I'm thinking of the reality of one of these people becoming President. It wasn't just a funny talk show of wild scary weirdos. It's for real. And I think what happened in my head was: Okay, just give me Biden.

"Look, George, you’re being a little wise guy, okay, which is typical for you. Just so you understand, very simple, it is very simple, there was no crime."

Said Trump to George Stephanopoulos.

Stephanopoulos is 5'5", so I take "little wise guy" as a personal insult.

Here's the clip:

"You have to go all the way back to President Harry Truman to find a president who even participated in the formal Washington celebration."

"(In 1951, Mr. Truman spoke from the Washington Monument about the progress of the Korean War.) In 1970, during the fractious era of Vietnam, President Richard Nixon videotaped remarks to be shown on the Mall. Other leaders have largely remained out of the picture, visiting troops or attending naturalization ceremonies or hosting bipartisan picnics on the South Lawn of the White House.... Mr. Trump, by contrast, cares not at all about public unity...."

Writes Michelle Cottle in "Trump Hijacks the 4th of July/The president decided that the one thing missing from the capital’s celebration was himself" (NYT), and I wonder how much she cares about public unity. Because I'm not feeling it. I mean, what's so bad about being like Harry Truman? It might be bad to "hijack" the occasion to propagandize about a war, and yet the 4th of July is kind of about enthusiasm about fighting wars. Those fireworks represent bombs bursting in air, don't they? Anyway, I think it's a good gesture to show up, if you do it the right way. It could be overly self-centered, but it doesn't have to be. I can be done in an appropriate scale and tone. We don't say Presidents "hijack" Easter when they do those egg roll events. Could everyone just calm down?

"That was how Theresa May’s premiership ended this week, wrecked by her blindness and secretive obstinacy, in loneliness, desertion and despair."

"That" = another damned "Game of Thrones" reference.

I'm reading "Theresa May Meets Her Lonely End/It would be understandable to feel sympathy for anyone so isolated and vilified. I don’t" by Jenni Russell in the NYT. Pretty melodramatic, no? We're in decline, I'm coming to think, and you see it in the need for TV-show-style narrative. I would prefer for our politics to be boring, but we've become addicted to politics as entertainment, and I don't think we'll find a way out. Writing that, I see that I'm being melodramatic... meta melodramatic. So far gone!

"It's just all feeling, like, really intense...."

I'm reading "James Charles, Tati Westbrook, and the feud that’s ripping apart YouTube’s beauty community/The feud between two giant stars, explained (for people who don’t follow the YouTube beauty community)" (Vox), and I cannot understand it because I was born before 1995. So I just took that 25-seconds out of that 43-minute video — a 43-minute video with over 47 million views — because it conveys the drama and my mystification. Something very big or very small appears to have happened.

"I wish you guys could just be inside my head and understand, like, really, truly, like, what YouTube means to me."

How despicable (or clever) is Trump's "See you on the campaign TRAIL, Liz!"

Today Elizabeth Warren, sometimes referred to by me as Pocahontas, joined the race for President. Will she run as our first Native American presidential candidate, or has she decided that after 32 years, this is not playing so well anymore? See you on the campaign TRAIL, Liz!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 9, 2019

I'm seeing Trump getting trashed — "Twitter Lampoons Trump for Apparent Trail of Tears Joke Aimed at Elizabeth Warren" (Mediaite).

"The joke here is that the Trail of Tears was a genocide. Get it? Get it?"

I'll just say 4 things:

1. Trump only wrote (yelled) "TRAIL." He didn't say "Trail of Tears." His haters are zeroing in on the Trail of Tears and insisting that's what he meant to refer to and that's what he thought was funny to say. It seems to me that "trail" is a more general term and a term that relates to Native Americans. It's that more general meaning that makes the specification "of Tears" understandable. It's as if these anti-Trumpsters have never heard of the Great Trail or the Natchez Trace.

2. If Trump's opponents really do feel empathy toward those who suffered in the Trail of Tears, why are they bringing it up to score political points? They're taking something weighty and somber and throwing it around gleefully, because they think they got Trump. Is that a smirk I see on their face?

3. Trump got his opponents to repeat his tweet. They are making it viral, because they think they are hurting him, but they are spotlighting Elizabeth Warren's worst problem and helping to insure that when we think about Elizabeth Warren, we think about her problematic use of the claim that she's Native American.

4. The Trump antagonists are giving us another example of the harshness of the left's demands. Whatever you say may be presented in the worst possible light. It seems that if anything can be portrayed as racist/sexist/homophobic, it will be, and you can be ruined in an instant in the America they have created and want to control. It's scary.